[ On Thursday, April 25, 2002 at 08:41:17 (-0400), Thomas Mueller wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Terse device names
>
> reed@reedmedia.net (Jeremy C. Reed) writes:
> > NetBSD is already easier to use than Windows.
> 
> except for "ed":

Oh, come on now!  :-)

'ed' is one heck of a lot easier to use then EDLIN (at least unless
you're a touch typist and you really like retyping things a _lot_.

> ed is for people who have a second computer where they can have the man page
> for ed showing, then they can walk back and forth as needed to find how to do
> what is needed.  NetBSD ed man page can be downloaded from online in plain text
> or HTML and copied to a floppy.  Second computer wouldn't have to have any BSD;
> DOS would be good enough.

It only takes the average person a couple of hours training and practice
to use 'ed' very effectively.  Of course any 'vi' or 'emacs' or other
full-screen editor expert will have to be prepared to unlearn a lot of
things, or at least be continually aware of of any pre-conceived notions
they might have about text editing.

One really good way to learn to use 'ed' efficiently is to learn it on a
printing terminal.  Too bad those things don't exist any more.  Maybe
someone should write 'xprterm' to simulate one for this purpose!  ;-)

> Tim Baldwin of IBM wrote a Tiny Editor for DOS and 16-bit OS/2, executable is
> slightly < 10000 bytes for DOS, slightly more for OS/2, and is much more
> user-friendly than ed.  He should have ported to Unix!  Because of outstanding
> functionality for such small size, Tiny Editor is used on OS/2 installation
> diskettes where necessary to edit the installation CONFIG.SYS.  Tiny Editor is
> strictly character mode, no graphic interface.
 
Personally I think Tim's Tiny Editor sucked, though I did use it enough....  :-)

MicroEMACS is quite small and works just fine on unix though.....

Jove is small enough and is in pkgsrc.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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